Womenomics, a must
In the coming decades, Europe will suffer from a noticeable decline
in qualified professionals (by 2030, we will be short by some 30
million), who we will be unable to replace with skilled immigrants,
because upcoming countries will be offering new opportunities to
their citizens that will eliminate the brain-drain of previous times.
While this is going on, half the women in the Western world with
scientific and technological backgrounds will voluntarily abandon
their professional careers at around the age of 30 with the apparent
aim of starting a family.
But perhaps there are other, more subtle, reasons for this abandoning
of careers. Some studies show that professional women are generally
not as inclined to the «peacock strategies» favoured by men that dominate
common business promotion procedures. Women demand that
their work be evaluated according to criteria of merit, productivity,
and competence, rather than on appearance and organisational politics.
When climbing the professional ladder, women demand logic, yet
organisations seem to go on appearance. Faced with this, many women
become frustrated, and decide this may be a good moment to have children
or look for other work more suited to their needs (and to the unequal
division of roles that is still practised by most couples).
Picture by Edmon de Haro.
Other studies show that in an advanced economy, with its high cost
of living, couples can only permit themselves to have children when
both are working. In order for this to be possible, and for work and
family to be compatible, organisations need to create conditions for
more personally sustainable employment: fewer meetings, increased
productivity, better tools, more rational evaluation procedures, objective-
based management, etc. The interesting result of all this is
that what starts off as women-friendly policies actually end up being
generally people-friendly. And that perhaps the most topical discrimination
would not be between men and women, but between childbound
and child-free individuals.
What is more, it has been proved that the type of management skills
that will be critical in an economy of creativity and collaboration are
more typical of women than of men.
The fact that there will be more women in organisation management
is not a question of gender, but of business. We need to define strategies,
put the tools in place and implement programmes that allow us
to change the way we work. And more specifically, we need to apply
policies that directly tackle that fight or flight moment that professional
women often face in their thirties, and prevent it holding back
their careers or restricting their potential talents.
Companies that do this will multiply their brains by two, and as
a result will increase intelligence – dual, open and diverse – and
vastly improve their options for survival in these ruthlessly competitive
times.
From my book: Visionomics
